UKIP is the most stupid Illusion the Brits can have.
I bought my first House 1976 in London and whenever Road workers cam to dig a hole to fix the Water pipes etc it took them several days sometimes weeks.
Now, with workers from Poland, Russia and Eastern Europe, it take 1-2 hours at the most and not half a day and this jobs are fixed and done with.
Get more of this Eastern Europeans to Britain and we can compete again with first world Countries!
Still my prefered Country to live, is China!

Sorry but in what way, shape or form, is the EU in any way like the USSR? Where are the gulags, the mass arrests of dissidents? If the EU were like the USSR, you'd be arrested for merely saying this, and I don't believe a bunch of Brussels heavies are about to cart you off to some prison in the middle of the night any time soon.

Hey let's not get carried away here; I never said the EU was like USSR in every respect. It clearly isn't.

Biggles62 asked for a single, even distant, similarity so I pointed out the democrat deficiency in both places.

Me? I want Britain to stay in the EU. I've lived and worked in continental Europe nearly all of my life. If Britain leaves, I might lose about 30% of my pension so I have a strong personal interest in the status quo.

tell that to the Eastern Europeans that have been told that they must accept Western European equality laws if they want infrastructure investment spending. they don't want homosexuals to have equal rights but they don't have a choice. they are being dictated to.
i'm guessing that dissent has been outlawed there in the same it has here. Labour responsible for that here but with the E.Europeans, it would have been ordered on condition of EU membership. they will no be legally allowed to dissent, Christians will not be allowed to freely choose whether they want to accept equal rights for homosexuals, they will be prosecuted if they don't.
this is a version of dictatorship, different from Soviet but still freedoms being restricted.

The EU is a voluntary club whose members make up the rules of membership. Quite reasonably, I think, applicants are expected to accept those rules. Of course, once in, they're always welcome to lobby for change. You see, it's kind of, well, democratic in lots of ways.

In all the posts I see in The Economist the words ignore the existence of the BNP. Ignoring it will not make it go away.I know there was no BNP candidate in Eastleigh.
Are the people who support immigration, and being in the E.U. conent to see the British nation swamped,and collapse into being just history?
Is patriotism dead?
Mona McNee

Unless we turn the tide of immigration, our nation will be swamped, just history, antiques. Is that what people want?
We need to get out of the Human Rights control, out of the E.U. and run our own country.
In the Economist comments I find no mention of the BNP. It does exist and because the three main parties are so out of touch, the BNP will probably grow. It cannot be ignored out of existence.
How else can the Conservatives be dragged into the real world?

Yes, but Tony Blair was extremely unpopular with the ongoing debacle in Iraq, and an effective opposition had every chance of beating his Labour party. The problem was the Conservatives simply weren't that opposition.

Chasing the UKIP voter is pointless - they are only really a problem in the more backwards parts of England. Any attempt to move to the right would further alienate the majority of Britons - who are a relatively liberal lot.

The Tories need to move to the centre. They made a good attempt with the gay marriage legislation, now they need to progress further.

An observation (not a judgement), but if the Tories or indeed any party need to move one way or the other and abandon their beliefs, than what is the point of them?

I changed my party affiliation from Republican to Independent when the Bible Brigade infected the Republican party. If that was what the majority of that party wanted to misguidedly campaign on, then I was free to say adios

I look forward to a day (hopeless optimist) when social issues are not used and abused by ALL parties to gain favor. But then again, I hoped that Facebook would just die and people would have real friends again too.

As one who lives in France, I'm not sure that I'm in the best position to ask the question, but I'll try anyway:
just which are the "backwards" parts of England, and on which criteria does one judge their posture?

Yes, of course, but to rule in a certain fashion or broadly in line with a certain set of beliefs. The Tories have, in the past, liked to portray themselves as the "natural party of government" and that they had no ideology other than to rule, i.e. they have no principals other than seeking and retaining power (which, for the avoidance of doubt, I'm not saying is the case, but... you see what I'm trying to say, hopefully).

If the Tories chase the UKIP vote, not only will they not get it, because Cameron doesn't look convincing as a right-wing loony, but they will make the Tory party look like the nasty party again, and turn off the voters they gained at the last elctoin, to the benefit of the Liberal Democrats.

The UKip are Britain's Tea Party preaching ideological purity as miracle cure. If the Tories can't avoid such a painfully obvious pitfall, then they should brace themselves for another decade and a half of Labour governance.

Guys... The East Leigh election did not make it to the BBC World News... You cannot just assume that anyone in America'n'stuff would know the results of the election there... I did Geography for 'O'Level... I don't even know where East Lea is... It certainly wasn't in Domesday
..
Before you start talking about stuff... Can you let us know... Please... What you're talking about

Seriously? It's in a blog called Blighty with a big picture of the UK parliament before the first line. It's obviously about Britain.
For the stuff you don't understand, rather than complain to the writers, couldn't you just use wikipedia? Even a below average five year old knows how...
(And it's Eastleigh, not East Leigh)

Thanx, Rob... Eastleigh was in Domesday... Glad we got that straightened out
..The Economist is marketed worldwide, not least to ex-Brits in the diaspora... It is NOT the house-magazine of the southern English Conservative party
..
Now to find a below-average five year old to tell me where Eastleigh is

There's a link in the article to the previous week's article about the election which would be a good place to start if, like most British people, you had never heard of Eastleigh until the Chris Huhne court case.

Eastleigh's only other claim to fame is that it was home to Benny Hill. Which probably doesn't help explain the election result.

The article seems to suggest that the Conservatives lost because they moved too far to the right, while the vote for the UKIP clearly stated they haven't moved far enough.

The truth is collapse in vote of the Conservative Party is due to two words "gay marriage". The voters can see the whole Western economy is in a mess, independence from Europe is a false illusion; little they do at the ballot box will make a difference.

However, even though Britain is a post religious society and many people are tolerant of gay practices conducted in private, the voters have made it quite clear they strongly resent being forced to embrace homosexual values.
A local candidate at odds with government policy makes no difference.

Cameron alone is responsible for this disaster. The man is mad and bad.
He must go.

Sorry, but with respect I don't think this is what resonated with the voters in this by-election. It did not come up as a major issue in the campaign in Eastleigh, so I can't quite see how you can claim it did. I agree that Cameron has antagonized some in his party by his support for gay marriage, but you need to understand that for the rest of us, gay marriage - whether we're straight gay or not - is simply not an issue. And for Cameron to win he needs to find issues that resonate with the majority.

What was the UKIP position on gay marriage? Genuine question, by the way, I have no idea and I'm told they have a fully-formed policy platform these days (not that I've bothered to try to find it, in continued full disclosure).

Which does make them much like the UK's equivalent of the Tea Party. I would be intrigued to know how much of the rise in their support in this by-election is down to this issue (which would assume the Tory anti-European piece has been temporarily pacified by the referendum promise, which I'm not sure is the case).
Personally, I don't think the state has any business regulating behaviour between consenting adults.

I would be intrigued to know how much of the rise in their support in this by-election is down to [the Gay Marriage] issue

I suspect hardly any, but then I don't a finger on the pulse of putative Hampshire UKIP voters. The point is, when you protest you neither have to state what you are protesting about nor explain how you want things to be different.

Conservative MPs and party members are no longer representative of Conservative voters in the way they were in the 1950s, when party membership was much larger and less political. The members are increasingly typical only of the head-banging tendency.

Unless the tide of immigration is turned, the "British nation" will end up just one more ethnic minority in an over-crowded land.
Cameron's statement of a referendum on the EU in 2017 is a non-fact double-speak. No parliament can commit its successor. We need a referendum NOW. Another 4 years of immigration??? What he really said was "Not on my watch!"